A Blog of Very Little Brain

Nintendo Advance with Yet-Another-Article-About-Video-Console-Controllers, makes the following statement regarding the Atari 2006 controller:
“Long before Nintendo arrived with the Nintendo 64 and made analog sticks mandatory on a controller, Atari experimented with the 2600 joystick. Unfortunately for Atari, and any of those who tried playing with this controller, it was too bulky and difficult for anyone with small hands to hold … The joystick only had eight directions, so in technicality it wasn’t an analog joystick. Lastly with all the problems that plagued the controller, the absence of a pause button only made it worse, when the joystick stopped working, you couldn’t even pause the game.”

A paragraph about the Atari 2006, with no actual content bar claiming the joystic was un-holdable, unmanageable and unplayable. Are those well researched facts, or does the writer vents his frustration of not being able to get past Pitfall!’s first level? A bit easier now to see why it’s called “Nintendo Advanced” and not “GameSpot”. I also like the “no pause button” on the controller meaning “when the joystick stopped working, you couldn’t even pause the game.” I would like to know how do you pause a game with a dysfunctional controller? How does hitting a button on a non-working controller pauses a game?

But a couple of words, if you may:

“Long before …(the N64) made analog sticks mandatory on a controller, Atari experimented with the 2600 joystic”. What’s the connection here? why not “Long before the Nintendo Gamecube had buttons, the Atari joystick had a button?” Also, the writer takes the wrong POV on the whole matter.
Atari’s joystick and button design was considered the ‘de-facto’ standard until Nintendo came with the D-Pad four-directional button design for their Nintendo Entertainment System controller. It took quite a long while before Nintendo came back with the analogue controller concept, which also, in its turn became the de-facto standard (as did the SNES shoulder buttons).

This weird analogy between the N64 analogue stick and the Atary2006 joystick becomes more apparent here: “The joystick only had eight directions, so in technicality it wasn’t an analog joystick.” This makes more sense. The guy simply has no clue about anything. Directions not make a joystic analogue. Analogue control means that different pressure on the control gets different outcomes. The joystick can move to 360 directions, but if a nudge right and a full pull to the right doesn’t give you different moves, it’s not analogue (meaning that your game character moves slower when you move the controller a bit, and run at full speed when you pull it all the way).
Controllers also have analogue buttons, which can only be pushed, so you can say they only have “2 directions”. They are, however, fully analogue.
(side note, I don’t pretend to know exactly how “analogue” was the Atari 2006 joystick as I have never actually used it.)

(Update: The guy’s a barrel of laughter alright. The Nintendo Entertainment System is referred to as “The NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) and Famicom (as it was referred to in Japan)”. Of course, it’s the other way round, as the system was called Famicom and the US version was called NES. Then he adds “the controller had … a four way directional D-Pad, which was designed by Gunpei Yokoi, as a superior alternative to the joysticks from Atari.” Actually the D pad was designed for the Game-and-Watch systems as a practical solution to the controlling problem those games offered, as they couldn’t have a joystick attached to them. But you gotta love the “superiour” part. He later claims that “Nintendo decided to bring the analog stick to offer complete 3D control.” How can 3d control be achieved with an analogue stick, heavens only knows.)

Pointing towards the Lowell Sun, a post already risen to fame concerning over 1000 edits to Wikipedia made from US government IP addresses. Most of these were made by interns working for congresspersons, and didn’t involve much more than padding up relevant entries, however, the bigger spiel refers to one U.S. Rep Marty Meehan, who’s staff edited his bio in the following way: Instead of “Meehan first ran for Congress in 1992 … As part of that platform Meehan made a pledge to not serve more than four terms, a central part of his campaign. This breaking of the pledge has been a controversial issue in the 5th Congressional District of Massachusetts.”
The edited entry read: “Meehan was elected to Congress in 1992 on a plan to eliminate the deficit. His fiscally responsible voting record since then has earned him praise from citizen watchdog groups. He was re-elected by a large margin in 2004.”
Lovely, even thought they forgot to add “God bless America”.

A quick jump to said Wikipedia entry reveals that indeed the damage has been undone: “Meehan first ran for Congress in 1992 … Meehan made a pledge not to serve more than four terms. He won the 1992 election and was re-elected to Congress every two years since, including the latest election (2004). On the House floor in 1995 he scolded members who might go back on their promise to limit their tenure in office. “The best test of any politicians’ credibility on term limits,” he said, “is whether they are willing to put their careers where their mouths are and limit their own service.” Despite this peldge (sic), he again ran for Congress in the year 2000, exceeding four terms. [2]”

Nice one. See if they dare remove it. But, what’s the [2] in the article stands for? It’s actually referenced to an article in a site called the US Term Limit about politicians running on the promise to quit after X terms, but have some issues with actually keeping that promise. However, unless you click or hover over the link, there is no indication that this is a link to an outside article and not an inner link to a note or referendum (unless you’re familiar with Wikipedia’s system of placing links to notes and references in superscript). If you do check the “item [2]” in the articles notes, lo and behold, you’ll find:
Lehmann, Evan. “Rewriting history under the dome”. Lowell Sun Online. January 27, 2006.

This got me thinking. The Lowell Sun wrote about the change in Wikipedia’s entry, which, after returning the original content “linked” to the Lowell Sun as a source! Isn’t that like anything said in a Libel suit can be published as “quotes from the trial” despite being libel?

Of course, I’m just taking it too far, as the real paragraph linking to the Lowell Sun article was the one where the Wikipedia incident was mentioned (emphasises mine): “On 18 July 2005, U.S. Rep. Marty Meehan’s staff made controversial changes to his Wikipedia article. These edits consisted of, among other things, removing verified facts that portrayed him in a bad light. On January 27, 2006, Matt Vogel, Meehan’s chief of staff, admitted to authorizing a replacement article on Meehan published on Wikipedia, with a staff-written biography.[2] This ran afoul of internal Wikipedia guidelines and possibly federal law.”

Oh my. Let’s start with the simpler ones, “Controversial” is in the eye of the beholder. You’d expect that the writer would use this, taking Wikipedia’s side, but keep in mind that Wikipedia, according to the Lowell Sun ‘promotes a “neutral point of view” policy.’ Hehe. sorry. Low blow.
Nos. 2, is the “his” reference. I assume the writer meant “this” (actually I don’t assume it, but let’s get on with it), as the Wikipedia entry about Rep Meehan is not exactly “his”. “About him” yes, “of him”, could be. “His”? Nope. Of course, Wikipedia writers tend to see themselves as the definitive article. In this way of thinking, writing an entry regarding person X is “the entry to end all entries”. And as such should be treated with all respect and integrity.

Which brings us to “possibly federal law.”
In a nutshell, WHAT?
Did I fell asleep or did someone hinted that Meehan’s staff actions are against Federal Law? I truly hope whoever did this didn’t log from home, as this goes way beyond libel.
Just to further clarify matters, here is the correlating paragraph from the Lowell Sun article (emphasises mine): “The changes by Meehan’s staff are not as “reprehensible” as inserting derogatory comments in someone else’s entry, said Stephen Potts, former director of the federal Office of Government Ethics, which establishes conduct standards for the executive branch.”

Still with me? Ethics, not law. Conduct standards, not law. OTHER PEOPLE, not Meehan’s staff.
After all the brouhaha about Meehan’s staff editing this and editing that, there goes annonymous poster X and just, based on what apparently is nothing more than a customary glance at the original article, hints that the editing goes against Federal law. I would love to know which law that would be.

(Update: Going through the editing made to the Wikipedia article, it seems that the original text was “changes to the Wikipedia article about him” which was changed to “his wikipedia article” by Wikipedia user Achille for reasons of “Grammar”. Feh.
The “possible federal law” bit was added by a user named Sukiari, no basis for this was given.
In both cases, this was the only change made, removing the possibility of a slip-up)

That’s a joke BTW, about resolutions.

I keep noticing a trend in my posts, where I start a parenthesis, and then develop it to a full blown paragraph, never realising I need to close off a bracket. This is the evil of Code Completion. You just get used to the fact that something will notify you of keeping a bracket open.

Also, I should refrain in the future about not posting for several days, then doodle something about parenthesis and call it a day.

I think the title of this short review says it all: “Marble Blast Ultra Fun, But Not Addictive”.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I just cring in dismay and, may I say, loathing upon this title. My opinions on “Addictive” are documented elsewhere, and while I’m no Tom Chick, I quite agree with his aversion to games being rated on the “fun” level. (In a nutshell, “fun” is a completely subjective element which has no similar meanings with any two different human beings. One sees fun in micro managing the Nth unit out of another gazillion ones, while the other sees fun in playing solitaire. Not that I have anything against subjectiveness in reviews (which are, after all, opinions), but saying that “Game X is fun” tells me nothing about it, unlike saying “Game X is a RTS with some heavy micro-management needed” or “Game X is a simple puzzle game like Tetris”.
Fun is not a way to describe games, or anything else. It’s simply not a description.

Try this as a test, supposed your friend/family/coworker comes back from the weekend and you ask him/her “what did you do on the weekend”, to which comes the answer “we had fun”. I believe this settles it, but just for the sake of the joke, let’s continue the discussion: “Yes, but which kind of fun?” “There’s only one kind of fun.” And so on. That kind of discussion is no fun. At least in my opinion.

Even if you don’t frequent OneAndOneIs2, you’re probably familiar with the author’s “Linux is not Windows” article. One of the examples of functionality Vs. User-Friendliness is given by comparing VI’s method of copying 5 lines to the bottom of the page (type d5d Shift-g p) to any Microsoft text editor (selecting the 5 lines block by either keyboard or mouse, cutting, scrolling to the bottom and pasting). Now this seems fairly straight forwards and simple. However, one guy didn’t find it as straightforward. While both this article and OneAndOne’s rebuttal tell the whole story, please notice what, according to PC Pipeline is the actual process of getting those 5 lines copied down:
ESC
d5d
ENTER
:Shift-g
ENTER
:p

My immediate reaction upon seeing this was “uh… no”. Now I’m no VI guru, but where the hell did all those ‘:’ and ENTERs come from? Click on the links for the whole story, I’ll just laugh away here.

(I realise the link is to VIm’s site and not VI’s. Find me VI’s site and I’ll link to it)

I’ve recently made some comments about online RPGs, which, regardless of how true, they fail to catch the really important issue. Gold Farming. I’m hardly an expert on this, but from my understanding, these are groups, or evern companies that play MMORPGs for days and hours on end, collecting money, experience and items, and then sell them for real-world money. I assume the logic here is, if you already paying for a: the game and b: the right to play it, you might just as well pay for c: gold and items.

It’s such an infallible logic that makes you understand why spam still thrives despite some technology moguls promises from 2 years ago. It would seem that people are dumb. Insanely so. You know all the SF stories about getting rid of all the mentally ill and ending up with a disfuncional world? Yep, we have reached that point.

More Philip K. Dick in the media, Boingboing once again with the spiel regarding a Robert Silverberg article in the Asimov’s science fiction magazine about Philip K. Dick and his “predictions” coming true. Actually, from the article it seems that Silverberg reflects less on the prophetic concepts in K. Dick’s work, or the inventions-come-realities concepts (which Dick’s book didn’t have), but more on his concepts of reality and what the future man will be.

On the other hand, some may say we already live in the future.